The root of the US problem: it’s turning into a poor country because the vast majority of the greedy rich people hoarding trillions, that used to go to middle class as wages and to general government funds, and their corrupt politicians enabling this vicious cycle.
Social welfare and mental healthcare exist so people aren’t crawling on the street. Every living person needs a basic level of respect, care and dignity... if the can’t provide for themselves, falling through the cracks is not a solution but a source of many more, more expensive and worse, problems. So socialism for the rich and nothing for the poor isn’t sustainable and people will eventually go “French Revolution.” A stable democratic country has to balance competing tyrannies: rich vs. middle vs. poor, country vs. city and community vs. individual.
At roughly 7k homeless people we're spending ~35k/homeless person in SF and making no headway. Which makes you wonder if throwing more money at it is the right answer.
LA recently voted to approve $335 million in funding for homeless people, but even before then was struggling to spend the money they had, at least partly due to NIMBYism: http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-city-homeless-bu... (not the article I was trying to find, but does mention some struggles spending the money).
As one SF writer once said. It's easy to claim Right to Individual bathroom if there is one or more bathroom per person. Problem is what happens where these twenty or more person per bathroom.
I'm not a huge fan of asking someone to prove a negative, but I do feel as if in this case it is justified: Can you refute the claim? Is there evidence that people do not generally need a basic level of respect, care, and dignity? Are there people that you find to be not deserving of those basic levels?
Depends on your definition of "need" and what exactly do you mean by this word.
If you mean that people without those things generally feel unhappy and sometimes die - well yes, it's just a matter of fact.
But if you mean that we need to forcibly remove other people's property in order to fulfill those needs - well, here is where you lose me completely. How do you figure that I, for example, "deserve" food and shelter to a bigger extent than you "deserve" what you own?
With a powerful army & technology controlled by government, this isn't an option anymore. Anybody trying to start something will be quickly and silently removed.
Masses can be brought down easily by a few professional soldiers (not with rudimentary rubber batons, as in Spain this weekend)
See how having an encrypted phone at border control is a felony, you can be locked up instantly, even if encryption is only to protect your work and personal family photos.
What to do? Just obey and continue working to collect $$$, the only instrument which can guarantee your semi-independence?
Revolutions don't follow this logic. They don't happen when oppression apparatus is weak but when it decides to turn against establishment or at least stay neutral. The spirit of the times decides.
Louis XVI still had largest army in Europe of 1789, Soviet Union had enough tanks in 1989 and powerful control over media and society.
US is actually similar to France in 1798 and Soviet Bloc in 1989 in many regards. Costly distant wars, pauperized middle class after very long period of growth and prosperity, sclerotic establishment in total denial that times have changes.
Revolutions aren't also a necessity. If most people are entertained/distracted enough, revolutions won't happen. Junkies don't rebel if they keep getting their fix.
I'd love to understand the fall of the Soviet Union better, it still seems so sudden and mysterious to me. Like the whole society just decided all at once that they were done. Does anyone have any good books on the subject?
According to Yegor Gaidar (look him up), USSR basically ran out of resources, including food supply, around 1985. However much army do you have does not matter if you can't feed it.
The problem was not only very high military spending (thanks Mr. Reagan, you won the Cold War), but also very low efficiency of industry and agriculture.
Having lived in the late USSR, I can attest that the scale of waste was enormous. It was not only because of the inadequate planning, but mostly because the population did not care. Without the feedback loop which a market provides, the only reasonable action for a worker was to steal; the fact that 10x more resources are wasted as a result was totally inconsequential: getting fired was hard, and unemployment was seriously negative.
We just spent the better part of two decades proving that the most powerful military on earth can’t effecticely control a bunch of poor people in Iraq and Afghanistan who have guns but not much else.
This is eerily the same thinking the Bush Whitehouse was using when it sold the American public on an Afghanistan and Iraq invasion. As if somehow a few professional soldiers and advanced technology would rule. Yet here we are 15 years later in our forever war.
We are not turning into a poor country because of "greedy rich". It has always been at the behest of politicians, they don't even need to be corrupt. The simple matter is the political class, the true one percent, have been disconnected for years from the population as a whole.
It is far worse for Democrats than Republicans. Regardless of how we see Trump the simple fact remains, the Democratic party has ignored its based for years. Nothing is more telling that the open mockery that was made of the Republican party for having so many candidates in the primaries, how did that become a bad thing? At least they let their base choose. By doing so a lot of independents also lined up on their side as well.
Yet what happens when the American people push back? The system does its best to clamp down or usurp the attempt. the Tea Party really did start off on its own but was eventually co-opted by national interests. Before it was there was no shortage of negative comments about it from all sides. There was also a dearth of attempts to limit campaign funds because neither party wanted a repeat where they did not control all dollars in politics.
The issue facing America is that it needs more than a two party system to go forward. Prior to the current President the majority of past Presidents worked for their party first and rarely for the people. This is true of the majority of Congress, laws are passed to protect their power, their party. When laws don't do the trick they resort to dividing people through speeches, innuendo, and out right lies. Politicians derive a lot of power by dividing people and then stepping up that they can "fix it" by punishing one side or another.
"San Francisco is in the future. San Francisco's future isn't pretty. It's cold, hard, technological. It's fueled by both extreme poverty and extreme wealth. By technology and heroin. It is the future of dystopian novels. It is the future of Gibson and Philip K. Dick. It is the future of Blade Runner. Someone needs to take hold of the dystopia dial and turn it back down. Quickly. Before it becomes too late."
I saw Blade Runner (1982) in the theatre this last weekend. First time I’ve watched it in probably a decade. It’s still an absolutely mesmerizing film, but I couldn’t help but think of San Francisco and Los Angeles while watching. The fact that it’s always raining in what’s supposed to be Los Angeles in 2019 foretells environmental disaster that seems not far off. The abject and gross poverty reminded me of the tent villages in SF. It’s a timeline I have little faith we’ll jump out of.
Life isn’t a movie: there are no mandatory self-fulfilling prophecies and learned helplessness is optional. Also, you can break by the bystander effect by actually doing something. Most people just pretend homeless people don’t exist, don’t deserve to be treated like people and shouldn’t be helped. Be different.
I also watched it last weekend, and one of the interesting tidbits was when talking to Sebastian he mentions that there's no housing shortage, and he wasn't allowed off-world, implying that everyone had wanted to get off world and those left behind are those who couldn't. Which seems a little contradictory (if everyone's trying to get off, why do Replicants want to come back?), but whatever. I wonder if Musk has thought about Blade Runner through this lens.
"Mayor Dianne Feinstein leads a group on a tour of Shantytown at Seventh and Berry streets in 1986. The group includes her press secretary Tom Eastham (left), Public Health Director David Werdegar and Thomas Dalton, “mayor of Shantytown.”
Not really "four blocks" by the way that most people would measure blocks. Berry Street stops at 6th Street and restarts on the other side of the Caltrain tracks at 7th. On top of that, the blocks in that part of the city are quite huge, probably 3 to 4 Manhattan street blocks.
There is still a shantytown that gets built up on 7th street every so often and is torn down once it gets big enough. I saw a well-constructed hut there that had a fire extinguisher mounted to the outside, with a building-code sign saying "Fire Extinguisher" pointing to it.
It looks like this photograph was probably taken on Berry street on the other side of the Caltrain tracks, near the Embarcadero Freeway, and "7th and Berry" is only an approximate location.
Mike just removed the price he paid for the wine (25$) and for the meal (250$ per person). Makes me hope that he realised how hypocritic it is to accept to pay that amount of money and complain that 'someone' needs to do something about the situation.
Everyone is in power to change their own behaviour and inspire others to do the same. That's the easiest way to change 'the system'. Refuse to accept and inspire others.
So what is it there to save USA from dystopian future ? Is it social democracy a la western europe. I kinda doubt that. I do not think that is sustainable either. For it to work you need rich consumers (usa, china ) and extraction of wealth from the weaker beasts in the forest ( eastern europe, africa , asia ).
What could we do to have a fairer system for everyone ?
For me the ultimate goal would be democratization of industry, factories should be run by the people who work in them, and all major institutions like banking should be nationalized.
> San Francisco is in the future. San Francisco's future isn't pretty. It's cold, hard, technological. It's fueled by both extreme poverty and extreme wealth.
I don't think extreme wealth would agree that extreme poverty is "fueling" wealth's future. At best, wealth might describe it as holding back the future, or at least the view.
I think equilibrium will be reached when basic services are automated, the poor have died, left or been pushed out, and $250 meals will be served by human waiters shuttled in to the city that they can't afford to live in.
as someone that does not live in SF, it is mind boggling that a city with such a high concentration of wealth, talent (both technical and non-technical) and visionaries supposedly (not trying to be trite) trying to make the world a better place have arguably failed miserably to make their own city a better place... Silicon Valley's PeaceFair parody seems to ring true here
In 2013, SF had[1] 7350 homeless population. In 2017, that number is 7499. So in spite of spending $240M/yr on homelessness, the number just keeps on increasing?
I would love to see detailed stats about: churn in homeless population (how many left the streets, how many joined), where exactly do we spend our tax dollars.
And then you see infuriating headlines like this[2] and wonder if "lack of money" is even a problem or is it just entrenched interests on all sides which won't let anything happen.
If they relocated them somewhere with a low cost of living, and just paid this money to each of them, all these people could just have a reasonably decent life, even without working.
This is, of course, just a thought experiment; it is impossible for a number of reasons.
The world OP describes SF as becoming is that of Atlas Shrugged where failure is never misfortune but a personal failing with the poor reaping their just desserts.
That only makes the dynamic even more exaggerated when you travel from a reasonably clean, streetcar-suburb neighborhood like West Portal or the Outer Richmond to the city core and are abruptly surrounded by a mass of bodies failed by society.
I just came back to sf after a 3 month trip and I have no clue how I ever got used to it. I took my parents to a cafe that sold $4 nitro cold brew and we couldn't sit outside because the smell of homeless people's shit from across the street was too strong.
This author's article points out the unique aspect: you can see the expensive restaurants and the homeless inches away from one another. that's what makes it not just unjust but so aesthetically absurd as to be dystopian.
No other city has such a stark contrast between the areas. In London, the poorest neighborhood is Canning Town, and even in its grimiest pockets, immediately south of Newham Way, it’s not as bad as parts of Tenderloin.
I would urge you to travel to Asia if you think so. Mumbai would be a fine place to start.
SF is not "racing ahead" to a dystopian future; its merely becoming a regular city where very rich and very poor cohabit. This egalitarianism is merely a passing phenomenon, which lasted for ~50 years, and is now shrunk to Western/Northern Europe and a few other small countries.
I, of course, should’ve said “no other city in a first-world country”, but if you think that Mumbai is a fine goal for Californians to aspire to, so be it.
True. But, on the other hand, over half of the properties on my street in NoPa are owned by trusts, and several don’t even look occupied. So, sort of the opposite side of the coin.
The ultra rich are taking over the real estate industry and destroying the American dream of owning your own home. Left unchecked they'll eventually buy up all the homes and we'll all be renters.
That's an enormous misinterpretation of what the author is saying. He's just juxtaposing the extreme wealth in the city with the poverty and drawing from his personal experiences to represent the wealth. He explicitly says
"The man pushing his house could have used that $250. We ate and drank it."
I’ve worked for him at Facebook; moved on to Deliveroo and lobbied our CEO to get him on board there. I’ve witnessed him make a lot of tough calls along very difficult to navigate moral lines, including race and extreme poverty. I’ve provided context and data to make those decisions.
I’m on the record calling him, to his face, let’s just say… “insensitive” (I used words that HN would frown upon). That’s because he’s really good at making a hard call when teams disagree, no option is the one good and the faster you get out of there, the better. That is (for someone in his position) a really good thing. He is very comfortable with being the bad guy when you need one. Happy to give more details, but I have good reasons not to like the guy.
But that guy is genuinely great. I really like him.
Mike is not a piece of shit, not even close to one. Mike is a genuinely great, complex human being. He’s the closest thing to a Russian novel protagonist — clearly not all shining white, but very articulate with his own contradictions and his own failings. That makes him a shockingly good leader.
He cares, dearly, about people without shelter, about those people’s children. I have walked with him passed people begging in the street; I have seen him respond many times to someone begging while we were the pub. I wasn’t able to confirm that, but I have reason to believe that he spent some time in similar circumstances.
But, like most people we work for, his temptation is to seek a solution ‘at scale’ and he doesn’t have one for poverty. And he indeed clarifies: his life and making the future is great. The juxtaposition is not. And he has no reason to not say that the contrast makes a bad situation worst. That’s not moral bankruptcy, that’s honesty.
He has no clear reason to consider that what he is building is making things worse for the poorest in America: poverty and wealth are rising simultaneously, in the same place. It’s ominous, like the SciFi he also refers to, but it’s not an econometric argument.
On the other hand, he has good reasons to think that Facebook and Deliveroo are giving to lower-middle class people more chances (I know: I wrote or reviewed some of those presentations).
If you read more of his blog posts, you’ll notice he talks about things that he can’t change in there. Knowing the guy, being powerless is far from his comfort zone. He likes fixing things, especially wrong incentives; he needs to.
I completely understand why you would think he is a piece of shit: he is blunt about his own moral failings. But he is the furthest from that. He’s a powerful person, who cares deeply about empathy, especially with the poorest people, without a way to change it, without the dial that he’s asking for. He likes having dials; that’s his favourite metaphor. He’s got a ton of dials at work (I know: I built many of them).
I would suspect that the reason being increasing visibly poverty in San Francisco is the lack of a budget at the Mayor’s office or the State level to help people with health issues, dependency, education, social support. I have been in SF about three days in my life, so happy to be explained otherwise. I would suspect that a lot of that missing tax could be linked to how large internet company process their added value. Again: I’m not a tax accountant, so feel free to criticise. That link would mean that, yes, extreme wealth from tech companies is related to extreme visible poverty in SF, but not because the software that let you earn a living leveraging Facebook or with Deliveroo is wrong or biased (i.e. it’s not Mike’s day job that is causing that). That would mean that the dial that Mike is talking about is the “fiduciary duty” that board members impose on companies (also a conversation that Mike is part of) de facto demanding that they use the Dutch sandwich.
If things were that simple, Mike would be immediately clearer about the issue and speak in the right context, i.e. in private. He would not write about it in his blog, a place that he uses for processing. Therefore, I know that reality is not as straightforward as my explanation.
The way I read this post is:
1. Mike cares about focusing on things that he can change (a big thing at Facebook in general & something he’s evangelical about, which is why I did shameful things to get him at Deliveroo) therefore he feels like he can’t afford to spend too much time thinking about a problem he’s got no ability to fix.
2. He also knows that distance drives indifference. His work on empathy at both companies was stunning.
3. I take this post as him writing about it to process the contradiction: he needs to put that problem aside because he’s got other things to do, but he doesn’t want to because he cares about it. He doesn’t want to change his own preference, his own happiness function to become someone who doesn’t care.
What you can do, if like me, like Mike, you care about this issue, is to find the person who was in charge of homeless welfare in SF and presumably has not been able to do their job. Ask them to respond to Mike, explaining what is happening, what could be solutions. Not sure I would be able to help (I now live in Manchester, UK, where the situation is visibly worst) or that Mike will have the time (him going to SF reaks of busy things happening at Deliveroo) but if we can help, we will.
Please don’t assume that because we are powerless, we are indifferent. We are uncomfortable.
I'm not sure if it's a well-known fact or fake news, but I remember talking to someone from the US and learning that quite a few states will pay a one-way ticket to California for their homeless.
Yes, I don't think they're poor because the rest are rich... There's a huge mental health problem there - and lots of drug use - and the administration has somehow seen fit to keep the poorest dwelling in the center of the most expensive city in the world, on purpose! I've lived there before - and that's how the tenderloin has been for a long time. It'll surprise anyone, even natives, that have not spent time in those parts. While that hasn't changed, I do see a continuous decline in the mental health of even the non-poor of SF.
That's not true. Wealthy people often do a lot of nice things for the homeless, and most of wealthy people didn't get rich taking money from the extremely poor.
Social welfare and mental healthcare exist so people aren’t crawling on the street. Every living person needs a basic level of respect, care and dignity... if the can’t provide for themselves, falling through the cracks is not a solution but a source of many more, more expensive and worse, problems. So socialism for the rich and nothing for the poor isn’t sustainable and people will eventually go “French Revolution.” A stable democratic country has to balance competing tyrannies: rich vs. middle vs. poor, country vs. city and community vs. individual.